Pala

UK band continues to make high-stakes music that excels best when acknowledging its dance-rock present rather than its emotive past.

There's a song on Friendly Fires' eponymous 2008 debut that's called "Jump in the Pool". The lyrical concerns are pretty straightforward (hint: jumping and pools are involved), but what makes it one of the LP's standouts is how its chorus takes the titular advice and just goes for it, changing from peppy polyrhythms to fast, charging lushness in a matter of seconds. It's a melodic shift that's as over-the-top as it is impressively delivered-- but that's kind of the point. Friendly Fires was best when playing to the rafters with romantic electro-gaze textures ("Skeleton Boy") and big, cheesy gestures ("Paris"). They're sensualists who excel under a lack of restraint.

Wisely, the band's sophomore effort, Pala, wastes no time submerging itself into its own indulgent environment. The multi-layered neon pop of album opener "Live Those Days Tonight" only hints at the LP's sonic ambition, as the band's immense co-production with buzz-bin consigliere Paul Epworth lends extra depth to its colorful sonic detail. There's been three years between Friendly Fires and this thing, and they've clearly spent it well by jewelling every last detail with careful precision (the B-movie blast that spools off "Blue Cassette"'s final reel, "Helpless"' backseat chatter and Boards of Canada keyboards).

To an extent, Pala also clears these guys' name on the "rockist dance-dilettante" list. From the galloping UK funky rhythm in "Chimes" to the filtered, bleeping funk of "Hurting", there's an array of styles tried on and, for the most part, successfully worn. Those successes speak as much to the band's listening habits as they do to a sense of maximalist adventurousness.

However, all the signifiers in the world don't change the fact that Friendly Fires are a rock band first-- and a particularly emotive one, at that. The band's three members got their start as teenagers in the never-known vocal-less "post-hardcore" (read: emo) outfit First Day Back. Anyone who's ever had a taste for that stuff knows that once it enters your blood, it tends to stay there, and Pala's high-stakes framework reflects that. Hearts are set on fire regularly (no, not like that), while impassioned pleas "Show Me Lights" and "Pull Me Back to Earth" are exactly as sweeping as you'd expect. It's when the band gets too entrenched in maudlin, dark-hued dramatizing (the too-slow-burn of the title track, "Chimes"' bald-faced falsetto foolery) that Pala's deep-sea diving feels similar to drowning.

Not to worry, though-- they have a sense of humor too, as "Hawaiian Air" proves. As the title suggests, frontman Ed Macfarlane's lyrical concerns focus on a trip to, you guessed it, Hawaii-- only, he spends the entire song detailing his escapades on the flight there ("watching a film with a talking dog," "skipping the meal for a G&T"), barely able to breathe in that tropical oxygen. It's a simple-pleasures zoom-in that belies the album's candy-painted sweep, a sneaky yet sentimental grin amidst all the pleading and sincerity-- 'cause this stuff is supposed to be fun, right?